Complete 360

By TROY PATTERSON

Published: November 5, 2006

ONLY REVOLUTIONS

By Mark Z. Danielewski.

360 pp. Pantheon Books. $26.

Mark DanieleWski's publisher recommends you read his new book, ''Only Revolutions'' -- it has been nominated for a National Book Award -- in incremental bursts. The idea is that, if you turn the book upside down and swing it around every eight pages, you can alternate the monologues of its two narrators, Sam and Hailey, so as to spin them together. Should this idea be trusted? Pantheon, after all, also insists the book is a novel, and that's quite a stretch. If we are to call ''Only Revolutions'' a novel, then we must, at the very least, call it a road novel in which the road (one of those numbered routes from an old, weird folk song) is a M?s strip.

Danielewski's book would be better described as an epic tone poem, a cult object in search of a cult, an experiment gone perfectly mad or a sacrifice to the Ouroboros -- the circular serpent symbolic of eternity, a snake eating its own tail. Further, to hijack Mary McCarthy's line about Vladimir Nabokov's ''Pale Fire,'' it is an infernal machine, a do-it-yourself kit ... and a trap to catch reviewers. This reviewer first felt trapped, then skinned.

It was not a wholly unfamiliar sensation. Danielewski's first book, ''House of Leaves'' (2000), was an erudite, quite horrible horror story in which a suburban family discovers that its house is bigger inside than outside; what starts as a little crack in domestic reality becomes a gaping cavern. Likewise, ''Only Revolutions'' begins as a standard exercise in narrative gamesmanship -- frames within frames, narrators you perhaps ought not rely upon -- and emerges as a sui generis art project where, as in a concrete poem, the very text scatters and dances and moves the action along.

Let's start at the end of ''Only Revolutions,'' which is also the beginning. The first page of Hailey's story contains upside-down text that constitutes the final page of Sam's story, and vice versa. (The author has the perfection of circles on his mind: it's a 360-page book; each narrator proceeds by degrees.) Hailey kicks things off with a cry -- ''Samsara! Samarra! / Grand! / I can walk away / from anything'' -- that refers to the Hindu cycle of birth, death and rebirth. Here and throughout, Danielewski lays out the language -- an onomatopoeic patois indebted to folkies, beatniks and golden-throated hustlers -- like the lines of a lyric poem: ''How'd I get so oodles for this nitwit, / zazzling strong, dingy and giddy / by my shazzling side?''

Hailey continues, ''Everyone loves / the Dream but I kill it,'' and then begins talking, like Shiva, about destroying the world. Turn the book around, and Sam's tale is wrapping up in a mirror mental image. ''Everyone betrays the Dream / but who cares for it? O Hailey no, / I could never walk away from you.''

Each story features, alongside the main narrative, a kind of sidebar with fragments of historical fact and shards of dialogue underneath a date, like snatches of some ominous news ticker. Hailey's first page and Sam's last is the one place where these dates converge, on Nov. 22, 1963.

Meanwhile, at the other end of the book, Danielewski juxtaposes the beginning of Sam's story -- ''I can walk away / from anything. / Everyone loves / the Dream but I kill it'' -- with a tally of names and ideas relevant to a century earlier, Nov. 22, 1863, the eve of the Battle of Chattanooga. And while the author has filled Hailey's historical sidebar in only up to May 29, 2005, the dates themselves keep running, with blank space beneath them, through 2063, where Hailey fades away in a finale like Sam's: ''Everyone betrays the Dream / but who cares for it? O Sam no, / I could never walk away from you.''

If you read ''Only Revolutions'' the way the publisher wants you to, you are assembling a nonstop adventure in which two 16-year-olds drive around with no particular place to go. Without aging, the pair go cruising in both a Model T and a Geo Metro in the course of this extended joy ride. At various points, Hailey and Sam seem to be friends, lovers, restless comrades and abstract concepts. They also share vibes with duos as various as Huck and Jim, Bonnie and Clyde, Vladimir and Estragon, and the Tweedles Dum and Dee.

Still here? That's two beginnings, two never-ending endings, 200 years of history in the making, one pivoting midpoint in Dealey Plaza, and one shared ''dream.'' The book -- its plot is both a perpetual-motion machine and nonexistent -- is baffling, quite possibly an elaborate folly that finds the author subordinating meaning to schema and human emotion to the presumed power of myth. But it's clear that Danielewski has an entrancing way with overrich wordplay: ''Sam admiring / how I tear through the current. / I am the current. And currently bare. / The currency of every dare.'' And anyone can see that the ''dream'' at stake is America, a country that wouldn't make complete sense if you thought on it till the end of time.